Another 21 Wild and Precious Lives Lost

It’s hard to imagine a high school student who hasn’t read Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” at least once. The poem, often taught as a call to live our lives to the fullest and to notice the world around us, ends with a stirring question that compels us to act:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What is perhaps less often recalled is the line that precedes the admonition implied in the question:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

It’s those words that haunt me as I think about the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where 21 wild and precious lives were ended because our country’s political leadership believes that the altar of the absolutist Second Amendment must occasionally be watered with the blood of innocent children.

I’m not writing here to argue with the gundamentalists who insist, despite all the historical, legal, and statistical evidence, that almost entirely unfettered access to guns is not dangerous and that the Second Amendment—unlike every other right in the Constitution—cannot be limited. I’m not writing here to persuade them because if the wild and precious lives lost at Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Robb didn’t persuade them that something must be done, surely nothing I can write and no evidence I can show them will ever change their minds.

I’m here to agree with the National Rifle Association.

They, at their ghoulish convention, held four days and four hours drive from the site of our latest national shame, have laid the blame on “the inexplicable existence of “evil.”

While I don’t understand why military-style video games or violent movies or the absence of school prayer or the rise of single-parent families—all the typical deflections—aren’t causing the rise of evil in any other developed country in the world, I’m inclined to agree that evil is at the root of this American crisis.

• How else to explain political leaders having ready-made Tweets to deploy after the next, inevitable mass casualty event?
• How else to explain our political leaders ignoring the expressed will of the public that sensible restrictions on guns will keep our children safe?
• How else to explain politicians who piously intone that they will do “anything they can” to help pass sensible gun regulation except change rules that let a small faction of Senators who represent a small percentage of Americans put NRA money and endorsements ahead of human life?
• How else to explain the impact on generations of kids who grow up traumatized by active shooter drills, the empty promise of a rapid police response when danger strikes, and that nagging voice in the back of their heads that makes them view classmates and visitors to their schools as threats?

For once, the NRA is right. This is evil. It’s an evil to talk about “hardening” schools and not limiting access to guns; it’s an evil to blame mental health for mass shootings while cutting mental health funding and blocking laws that would limit access to weapons for people who pose a threat; it’s an evil to lose so many innocent lives that [even these kids]—one who loved fashion, one who made coffee for his grandparents every morning, one who loved “Sweet Child O’ Mine”—will, while living in the hearts of their families and friends forever, will soon become footnotes in this nation’s bloody war against its own children.

Who made this world, Mary Oliver might ask us, and why, if we are paying attention, would we ever let it continue as it has?